Quentin Durward, by Walter Scott

Author’s Introduction

The scene of this romance is laid in the fifteenth century, when the feudal system, which had been the sinews and
nerves of national defence, and the spirit of chivalry, by which, as by a vivifying soul, that system was animated,
began to be innovated upon and abandoned by those grosser characters who centred their sum of happiness in procuring
the personal objects on which they had fixed their own exclusive attachment. The same egotism had indeed displayed
itself even in more primitive ages; but it was now for the first time openly avowed as a professed principle of action.
The spirit of chivalry had in it this point of excellence, that, however overstrained and fantastic many of its
doctrines may appear to us, they were all founded on generosity and self denial, of which, if the earth were deprived,
it would be difficult to conceive the existence of virtue among the human race.

Among those who were the first to ridicule and abandon the self denying principles in which the young knight was
instructed and to which he was so carefully trained up, Louis XI of France was the chief. That sovereign was of a
character so purely selfish — so guiltless of entertaining any purpose unconnected with his ambition, covetousness, and
desire of selfish enjoyment — that he almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to
corrupt our ideas of honour in its very source. Nor is it to be forgotten that Louis possessed to a great extent that
caustic wit which can turn into ridicule all that a man does for any other person’s advantage but his own, and was,
therefore, peculiarly qualified to play the part of a cold hearted and sneering fiend.

The cruelties, the perjuries, the suspicions of this prince, were rendered more detestable, rather than amended, by
the gross and debasing superstition which he constantly practised. The devotion to the heavenly saints, of which he
made such a parade, was upon the miserable principle of some petty deputy in office, who endeavours to hide or atone
for the malversations of which he is conscious by liberal gifts to those whose duty it is to observe his conduct, and
endeavours to support a system of fraud by an attempt to corrupt the incorruptible. In no other light can we regard his
creating the Virgin Mary a countess and colonel of his guards, or the cunning that admitted to one or two peculiar
forms of oath the force of a binding obligation which he denied to all other, strictly preserving the secret, which
mode of swearing he really accounted obligatory, as one of the most valuable of state mysteries.

To a total want of scruple, or, it would appear, of any sense whatever of moral obligation, Louis XI added great
natural firmness and sagacity of character, with a system of policy so highly refined, considering the times he lived
in, that he sometimes overreached himself by giving way to its dictates.

Probably there is no portrait so dark as to be without its softer shades. He understood the interests of France, and
faithfully pursued them so long as he could identify them with his own. He carried the country safe through the
dangerous crisis of the war termed “for the public good;” in thus disuniting and dispersing this grand and dangerous
alliance of the great crown vassals of France against the Sovereign, a king of a less cautious and temporizing
character, and of a more bold and less crafty disposition than Louis XI, would, in all probability, have failed. Louis
had also some personal accomplishments not inconsistent with his public character. He was cheerful and witty in
society; and none was better able to sustain and extol the superiority of the coarse and selfish reasons by which he
endeavoured to supply those nobler motives for exertion which his predecessors had derived from the high spirit of
chivalry.

In fact, that system was now becoming ancient, and had, even while in its perfection, something so overstrained and
fantastic in its principles, as rendered it peculiarly the object of ridicule, whenever, like other old fashions, it
began to fall out of repute; and the weapons of raillery could be employed against it, without exciting the disgust and
horror with which they would have been rejected at an early period, as a species of blasphemy. The principles of
chivalry were cast aside, and their aid supplied by baser stimulants. Instead of the high spirit which pressed every
man forward in the defence of his country, Louis XI substituted the exertions of the ever ready mercenary soldier, and
persuaded his subjects, among whom the mercantile class began to make a figure, that it was better to leave to
mercenaries the risks and labours of war, and to supply the Crown with the means of paying them, than to peril
themselves in defence of their own substance. The merchants were easily persuaded by this reasoning. The hour did not
arrive in the days of Louis XI when the landed gentry and nobles could be in like manner excluded from the ranks of
war; but the wily monarch commenced that system, which, acted upon by his successors, at length threw the whole
military defence of the state into the hands of the Crown.

He was equally forward in altering the principles which were wont to regulate the intercourse of the sexes. The
doctrines of chivalry had established, in theory at least, a system in which Beauty was the governing and remunerating
divinity — Valour, her slave, who caught his courage from her eye and gave his life for her slightest service. It is
true, the system here, as in other branches, was stretched to fantastic extravagance, and cases of scandal not
unfrequently arose. Still, they were generally such as those mentioned by Burke, where frailty was deprived of half its
guilt, by being purified from all its grossness. In Louis XI’s practice, it was far otherwise. He was a low voluptuary,
seeking pleasure without sentiment, and despising the sex from whom he desired to obtain it. . . . By
selecting his favourites and ministers from among the dregs of the people, Louis showed the slight regard which he paid
to eminent station and high birth; and although this might be not only excusable but meritorious, where the monarch’s
fiat promoted obscure talent, or called forth modest worth, it was very different when the King made his favourite
associates of such men as the chief of his police, Tristan l’Hermite. .

Nor were Louis’s sayings and actions in private or public of a kind which could redeem such gross offences against
the character of a man of honour. His word, generally accounted the most sacred test of a man’s character, and the
least impeachment of which is a capital offence by the code of honour, was forfeited without scruple on the slightest
occasion, and often accompanied by the perpetration of the most enormous crimes . . . It is more than
probable that, in thus renouncing almost openly the ties of religion, honour, and morality, by which mankind at large
feel themselves influenced, Louis sought to obtain great advantages in his negotiations with parties who might esteem
themselves bound, while he himself enjoyed liberty. He started from the goal, he might suppose, like the racer who has
got rid of the weights with which his competitors are still encumbered, and expects to succeed of course. But
Providence seems always to unite the existence of peculiar danger with some circumstance which may put those exposed to
the peril upon their guard. The constant suspicion attached to any public person who becomes badly eminent for breach
of faith is to him what the rattle is to the poisonous serpent: and men come at last to calculate not so much on what
their antagonist says as upon that which he is likely to do; a degree of mistrust which tends to counteract the
intrigues of such a character, more than his freedom from the scruples of conscientious men can afford him advantage.
.

Indeed, although the reign of Louis had been as successful in a political point of view as he himself could have
desired, the spectacle of his deathbed might of itself be a warning piece against the seduction of his example. Jealous
of every one, but chiefly of his own son, he immured himself in his Castle of Plessis, intrusting his person
exclusively to the doubtful faith of his Scottish mercenaries. He never stirred from his chamber; he admitted no one
into it, and wearied heaven and every saint with prayers, not for forgiveness of his sins, but for the prolongation of
his life. With a poverty of spirit totally inconsistent with his shrewd worldly sagacity, he importuned his physicians
until they insulted as well as plundered him. .

It was not the least singular circumstance of this course, that bodily health and terrestrial felicity seemed to be
his only object. Making any mention of his sins when talking on the state of his health, was strictly prohibited; and
when at his command a priest recited a prayer to Saint Eutropius in which he recommended the King’s welfare both in
body and soul, Louis caused the two last words to be omitted, saying it was not prudent to importune the blessed saint
by too many requests at once. Perhaps he thought by being silent on his crimes he might suffer them to pass out of the
recollection of the celestial patrons, whose aid he invoked for his body.

So great were the well merited tortures of this tyrant’s deathbed, that Philip de Comines enters into a regular
comparison between them and the numerous cruelties inflicted on others by his order; and considering both, comes to
express an opinion that the worldly pangs and agony suffered by Louis were such as might compensate the crimes he had
committed, and that, after a reasonable quarantine in purgatory, he might in mercy he found duly qualified for the
superior regions . . . The instructive but appalling scene of this tyrant’s sufferings was at length closed
by death, 30th August, 1483.

The selection of this remarkable person as the principal character in the romance — for it will be easily
comprehended that the little love intrigue of Quentin is only employed as the means of bringing out the story —
afforded considerable facilities to the author. In Louis XI’s time, extraordinary commotions existed throughout all
Europe. England’s Civil Wars were ended, rather in appearance than reality, by the short lived ascendancy of the House
of York. Switzerland was asserting that freedom which was afterwards so bravely defended. In the Empire and in France,
the great vassals of the crown were endeavouring to emancipate themselves from its control, while Charles of Burgundy
by main force, and Louis more artfully by indirect means, laboured to subject them to subservience to their respective
sovereignties. Louis, while with one hand he circumvented and subdued his own rebellious vassals, laboured secretly
with the other to aid and encourage the large trading towns of Flanders to rebel against the Duke of Burgundy, to which
their wealth and irritability naturally disposed them. In the more woodland districts of Flanders, the Duke of
Gueldres, and William de la Marck, called from his ferocity the Wild Boar of Ardennes, were throwing off the habits of
knights and gentlemen to practise the violences and brutalities of common bandits. 1

A hundred secret combinations existed in the different provinces of France and Flanders; numerous private emissaries
of the restless Louis, Bohemians, pilgrims, beggars, or agents disguised as such, were everywhere spreading the
discontent which it was his policy to maintain in the dominions of Burgundy.

Amidst so great an abundance of materials, it was difficult to select such as should be most intelligible and
interesting to the reader: and the author had to regret, that though he made liberal use of the power of departing from
the reality of history, he felt by no means confident of having brought his story into a pleasing, compact, and
sufficiently intelligible form. The mainspring of the plot is that which all who know the least of the feudal system
can easily understand, though the facts are absolutely fictitious. The right of a feudal superior was in nothing more
universally acknowledged than in his power to interfere in the marriage of a female vassal. This may appear to exist as
a contradiction both of the civil and canon laws, which declare that marriage shall be free, while the feudal or
municipal jurisprudence, in case of a fief passing to a female, acknowledges an interest in the superior of the fief to
dictate the choice of her companion in marriage. This is accounted for on the principle that the superior was, by his
bounty, the original granter of the fief, and is still interested that the marriage of the vassal shall place no one
there who may be inimical to his liege lord. On the other hand, it might be reasonably pleaded that this right of
dictating to the vassal to a certain extent in the choice of a husband, is only competent to the superior from whom the
fief is originally derived. There is therefore no violent improbability in a vassal of Burgundy flying to the
protection of the King of France, to whom the Duke of Burgundy himself was vassal; not is it a great stretch of
probability to affirm that Louis, unscrupulous as he was, should have formed the design of betraying the fugitive into
some alliance which might prove inconvenient, if not dangerous, to his formidable kinsman and vassal of Burgundy.
2

Abbotsford, 1830.

1 Chapter I gives a further account of the conditions of the period which
Quentin Durward portrays.

2 Some of these departures from historical accuracy, as when the death of the
Bishop of Liege is antedated, are duly set forth in the notes. It should be mentioned that Mr. J. F. Kirk, in his
elaborate History of Charles the Bold, claims that in some points injustice has been done to the Duke in this romance.
He says: “The faults of Charles were sufficiently glaring, and scarcely admitted of exaggeration; but his breeding had
been that of a prince, his education had been better than that of other princes of his time, his tastes and habits were
more, not less, refined than theirs, and the restraint he imposed upon his sensual appetites was as conspicuous a trait
as his sternness and violence.”